Evolving Paradise

Isolation Has Changed Creatures Of The Florida Keys Into Something Other Than What They Used To Be.

August 25, 2002|By Bill Belleville, Special to the Sentinel

BIG PINE KEY - I am knee deep in flowing tidal water, sidestepping fist-sized chunks of coral and small stingrays on the white sand, when I see my first Key deer. It is 50 yards away, across a salt marsh basin of marl and sea purslane, immersed in water, nibbling at the new green shoots on the low branches of a red mangrove tree.

It has a little rack -- a six-pointer -- and is, for all purposes, a fully grown whitetail buck. Except, what is knee-deep water for me is neck-deep for the deer.

Ordinarily, this would have been an odd dream, just enough details to make it right, but otherwise out of proportion -- me as Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians. Except this is real life: I am on the lee shore of Big Pine in the Lower Florida Keys, and the little whitetail would always be tiny, no larger than a collie.

You could argue the notion of reality is uncertain here in these Keys anyway. They do seem squarely off the mainstream grid, trailing out into the south Atlantic from Florida's southerly cape between the cusp of the tangible and the bit less so. This is, after all, a region that takes great pride in calling itself the "Conch Republic" in honor of a giant marine snail with a bright pink-lipped shell.

But that hardly explains the flesh-and-blood existence of the Key deer. Nor does it account for all the other raging signs of speciation present on these islands: The colorful banded tree snails, so unique they vary from one set of woods to another; the ringless ring-necked snake; the little marsh bunny unlike any found back on the mainland, a sub-group named hefneri after the founder of the Playboy empire.

As Darwin found in the Galapagos, isolation will more clearly change us into something other than what we used to be. Geographic seclusion will adapt, modify, speciate us. At times, it will make us downright peculiar.

Of the 43 islands linked together by the 110-mile-long Overseas Highway of U.S. Highway 1, the two with the largest chunks of natural land remaining are Key Largo to the north and Big Pine to the south. Hundreds of other smaller keys in the archipelago are scattered about -- some as feral as the day they were birthed from the sea and sand. Uncorseted by the highway, they can be seen on the horizon shimmering like mirages.

But the roaded, bridged islands of Key Largo and Big Pine are remarkable for their great lopsided irony: Natural terrain on each sustains wildlife so rare it exists nowhere else in the world. Yet, this habitat pushes up against curious displays of civilization.

The undeveloped landscape on north Key Largo, an asylum for tree snails and American crocodiles and endemic wood rats, is barely a half-mile from the Caribbean Club, a rowdy waterfront tavern claiming to be the location for the classic film Key Largo. Down near Big Pine, Lilliputian white-tails routinely wander out of the Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge and into the parking lot of the ramshackle No Name Bar & Grill, the slogan of which is "A Nice Place If You Can Find It."

Despite the homogenizing crush of upscale development, there also are enclaves of humans here as rare as the wildlife. Perhaps the nearby refuges somehow comfort them, too.

Because I have driven down from Miami, Key Largo -- at the very top of this chain -- seems a good place to start my quest for island mutations. Today, while other visitors are answering the boozy sirens' call of Margaritaville, I am preparing to traipse through the seldom-seen northern half of this key.

From the mainland, U.S. 1 skirts some salt marsh savannas, leaps over Jewfish Creek, then lands smack in the middle of this island, chewing up what comes afterward and spitting it back out as a go-fast, neon-lit, MTV stage set. In doing so, it bypasses about 10 miles of natural land on the northern half of Key Largo, a territory spliced to the mainland by the more remote Card Sound bridge and a lonely double-lane strip of asphalt.

When I first started visiting these Keys 20 years ago, ambitious real estate speculators were preparing to go into a feeding frenzy here. In violation of both natural and man-made laws, they began to scrap and dredge, erecting grand blossom-shrouded, stuccoed gates leading to what would be Port Bougainvillea, which they described as "an imitation Mediterranean coastal village." They sliced a harbor out of the mangrove-covered limerock, ignoring what sediment and pollution would do to the coral reef offshore.

They soon went bankrupt, thus allowing the state of Florida to buy the land, preserving it by the default of fiscal Darwinism.

Elsewhere on north Key Largo, land is largely protected by public ownership or by the presence of endangered critters. Novelist Carl Hiaasen's renegade Skink character sometimes lives here, cooking road-kill snake and taking revenge on those whom would Cuisinart natural Florida.